Lucille Roberts, 59, Founder Of Fitness Chain for Women

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: July 18, 2003

Lucille Roberts, a businesswoman whose ambition to create ''the McDonald's of health clubs'' inspired a chain of bargain-basement gyms for women, died yesterday at New York University Downtown Hospital in Manhattan. She was 59.

The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, Bob. She lived in Manhattan.

Mrs. Roberts built a chain of 50 gyms with 200,000 members in the New York metropolitan region by charging half or less of what many competitors asked. Her clubs were for women only, partly because she wanted to protect women from being ogled in coed gyms.

Mrs. Roberts said her target market was secretaries, teachers and the wives of policemen, and she said she knew how to please them -- an assertion the $50 million collected each year from members seemed to support.

''It is only the upper classes who are into exercise for health,'' she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1997. ''The middle classes just want to look good. We have tried health classes. They just want to fit into tight jeans.''

Her business strategy involved recruiting as many members as possible and crowding them into large gyms. By continually adding more gyms, she was able to keep down the cost of advertising -- a significant and critical expenditure for health clubs -- on a per-member basis. The result was summed up by a promotional slogan Lucille Roberts used for years: ''More Gym Less Money.''

Ms. Roberts was born in the Soviet Union on Dec. 7, 1943, in what is now an independent country, Tajikistan. In an interview in Success magazine in 1998, she said her father lost a son in the war.

''I became a surrogate son,'' she said. ''I never knew there was anything in the world I couldn't do. It was just a matter of when and how.''

Her family was Jewish, and, facing religious persecution in the Soviet Union, immigrated to the United States and settled in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn when she was 13. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964 and worked in a succession of jobs in retailing.

The last was at Kitty Kelly Inc., which sold shoes and other merchandise. Mrs. Roberts was promised a $50 raise if she met a difficult sales target. She reached it, but did not receive the raise. She quit and started her own business with her husband.

In addition to him, she is survived by her sons Kevin and Kirk, both of Manhattan.

Mrs. Roberts hated to deal with inventory and wanted to find a business in which things like colors and sizes did not matter, she said in an interview with CNNfn in 1999. A self-described exercise nut, she said her first idea was to teach an exercise class for women at a hotel.

Instead, she decided that what women really needed was a place where they could exercise with no men around, The Wall Street Journal reported in 1997. She and her husband put up $10,000 of their savings, borrowed $5,000 each from their parents and opened a little ''spa'' opposite Macy's in Manhattan.

The club was an immediate success, but its name, the Body Shop, caused confusion: People thought it was an auto-repair business. Within two years, two additional clubs opened, and the name was changed to Lucille Roberts.

The overriding goal was to be friendly to women. No heavy weights or elaborate machines were emphasized; classes were easy to follow and taught by people with less-than-perfect bodies. The classes lasted only 30 minutes so they could easily fit into women's schedules.

The Robertses also invested heavily in real estate, buying whole shopping centers as well as individual buildings for health clubs. At the time of her death, they were about to begin selling franchises elsewhere in the United States, Mr. Roberts said.